Security provides the solid foundation for life well lived

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Money can’t buy you love, according to the Beatles – but it can at least sort out your future security…and it’s that absence of security, in all of its aspects and guises, that lies so firmly at the core of so many people’s stress.

Most obviously, a lack of money means you cannot guarantee a roof over your head – and as a recent EU report on Ireland admitted, this has now become a source of ‘permanent insecurity’ for so many.

The point of the European Social Policy Network report was to lay the blame for this at the feet of successive Irish Governments for over-relying on the private sector to provide housing – therefore leaving those who cannot afford that option in the lurch.

But security, or the lack of it, goes much deeper than having a place to live – even if it still revolves around materialism. Workers, for example, wonder if their job is safe in these uncertain economic times.

And perhaps it’s always been this way – and there have obviously been deeper recessions and massive closures in the past – but that job security that other generations took for granted is now so rarely the reality.

Every parents’ hope for their children was to see them into a permanent and pensionable job; a place to work for life, secure in the knowledge that the odds were stacked in your favour of making it through to the other end.

Nobody talks about that anymore; those seeking employment now would not alone fail to recognise the notion of permanent and pensionable; they would positively recoil from the idea of starting a job today and retiring from the same place in around 40 years’ time.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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